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cc_foo · Jun 3, 2003, 01:03 PM

Hi,

I am dabbling with mail.app for a short time. Eudora 5.2 (or 6) is my mail emailer now. Mail.app has some things I like -- it supports format=flowed, integrates with the Address Book, is Cocoa based (uses Services, and generally looks gorgeous), rendes HTML nicely...

Mail.app looks a bit "inspired" by Eudora actually... although it looks a bit like a toy...

I have about 20MB of old email extending back to 1995, in Eudora format. Assuming importation of that email into mail.app goes well, does mail.app handle such a large amount of mail well? I am wondering if it might get bogged down with indexing (indexing/searching being a feature of mail.app that I like). I am also concerned that mail.app simply won't handle that volume, and crash all the time.

Eudora has served me well so far. And it's mailboxes are in an open text format, making it easy for me to move to other programs. Would it be "a bad thing" to attempt to use mail.app for my future email usage/storage?

Any recommendations of other email programs for OS X that are suited for large amounts of email.

Thanks.

NeXTLoop · Jun 3, 2003, 02:11 PM

CC, I'm not sure if its a mistake on your part, but 20MB is not a lot of e-mail. Perhaps you meant 200MB?

If you're dealing with 20MB, Mail will be more than sufficient. If you're dealing with 200MB..... well, in that case, you'll have to see what you consider robust. Will Mail handle that much e-mail? Yes. My Mail folder is almost 400MB and it handles it. Does it handle it as fast as Eudora? No. Eudora is, hands down, the best client for large volumes of e-mail.

If I were you, I'd download Eudora Mailbox Cleaner to import your mail (as it does a much better job than Mail's built-in importer), and then try them both. See if you can live with the speed hit you'll experience with Mail.

cpac · Jun 3, 2003, 02:17 PM

another thing to consider would be archiving some of your older mail (if you don't need to access it all the time...).

mrtew · Jun 3, 2003, 10:28 PM

Originally posted by NeXTLoop:
CC, I'm not sure if its a mistake on your part, but 20MB is not a lot of e-mail. Perhaps you meant 200MB?

I have 216MB in my Mail.app program much of which was imported from my old Netscape account going all the way back to my very first email. Mail hasn't crashed on me once since I installed Jaguar and I've never lost anything when it did used to crash occasionally. Can't recommend it enough.

SubGeniux · Jun 4, 2003, 07:01 AM

I was a staunch Entourage user, and before that outlook on OS9, but just recently I started trying out Mail and have now switched to it entirely, It has its flakey bits, and sometimes does funnky stuff on me, but rarely, works pretty solidly.
I'm now using ical and address book too, and they seem to run in a smaller memory space than Entourage.

Yeah, i really like mail, simple and powerful.

CatOne · Jun 4, 2003, 12:20 PM

Originally posted by cc_foo:
Hi,

I am dabbling with mail.app for a short time. Eudora 5.2 (or 6) is my mail emailer now. Mail.app has some things I like -- it supports format=flowed, integrates with the Address Book, is Cocoa based (uses Services, and generally looks gorgeous), rendes HTML nicely...

Mail.app looks a bit "inspired" by Eudora actually... although it looks a bit like a toy...

I have about 20MB of old email extending back to 1995, in Eudora format. Assuming importation of that email into mail.app goes well, does mail.app handle such a large amount of mail well? I am wondering if it might get bogged down with indexing (indexing/searching being a feature of mail.app that I like). I am also concerned that mail.app simply won't handle that volume, and crash all the time.

Eudora has served me well so far. And it's mailboxes are in an open text format, making it easy for me to move to other programs. Would it be "a bad thing" to attempt to use mail.app for my future email usage/storage?

Any recommendations of other email programs for OS X that are suited for large amounts of email.

Thanks.

Heh. 20 MB. Lots of people get that amount of email in a day, if you count attachments. I probably get 30-50 emails a day (this is on the LOW side of my colleagues) with 10-20 MB of total size.

What I *do* know is that I have a few coworkers who were grousing about Entourage because of its 2 GB database limit (when you hit this, all hell breaks loose). These people converted to mail about a year ago, and haven't had a problem since. I'd reckon they have 3-4 GB of mail now. So size of the library isn't an issue at all.

I used Eudora on the PC for 5 years, and then Outlook on the PC for a year. During the same time I used Entourage on the Mac and liked it, but slowly stepped into Mail when I changed jobs (no comment on where I am ;-) At any rate I've come to like Mail quite a bit. There are still some features that are missing, but it's certainly sufficiently "robust" for day to day use as your only email client.

moki · Jun 4, 2003, 12:40 PM

Originally posted by cc_foo:
I have about 20MB of old email extending back to 1995, in Eudora format. Assuming importation of that email into mail.app goes well, does mail.app handle such a large amount of mail well? I am wondering if it might get bogged down with indexing (indexing/searching being a feature of mail.app that I like). I am also concerned that mail.app simply won't handle that volume, and crash all the time.

Yes, Mail.app will handle it fine. My mail folder is well over 500mb currently.

ARENA · Jun 4, 2003, 01:10 PM

I was going to post another thread to ask this, but i thought this one is fine...

How can i make mail archives with Mail.app?

I have over 3000 mails in my inbox that i would like to archive, burn to a cd and delete from the mail database in my HDD.
I could burn the entire -?/Library/Mail', but then how could i read those mails later?

JLFanboy · Jun 4, 2003, 02:17 PM

Call me incredibly naive, but how the hell could you guys possibly have 200+ MBs of mail that you need to KEEP!?!. That's crazy. I've never had more than a couple of megs--at the most--in Mail.app at a time. Granted, attachments can take up a lot of space, but can't you just save the attachments you need, and delete the rest after they've just been sitting there for a while?

Granted, I don't use e-mail as heavily as some. But 3-4 GBs! How is that possible.

NeXTLoop · Jun 4, 2003, 02:32 PM

Originally posted by JLFanboy:
Call me incredibly naive, but how the hell could you guys possibly have 200+ MBs of mail that you need to KEEP!?!. That's crazy. I've never had more than a couple of megs--at the most--in Mail.app at a time. Granted, attachments can take up a lot of space, but can't you just save the attachments you need, and delete the rest after they've just been sitting there for a while?

Granted, I don't use e-mail as heavily as some. But 3-4 GBs! How is that possible.

I've got about 500MB, and most of it is business. I have a software company and can receive around 60-100 a day easily. If you look at Moki, he's also in software development, and that probably accounts for a lot of his e-mail too. When you have people e-mailing in questions, or requests for support, its a good idea to hang on to them, as you may have to refer to them at a later date.

JLFanboy · Jun 4, 2003, 03:06 PM

Okay, I can live with that.

...just glad I'm not in software development.

mark9939 · Jun 4, 2003, 03:16 PM

Right now I have 12.4 MB in Mail.app. I can't call myself a power user, but I think Mail.app is really a great program. I'd reccomend using it.

escher · Jun 4, 2003, 03:22 PM

cc_foo: I use (and love) Eudora and wouldn't dare go near Mail.app. But if you want to migrate to go from Eudora to Mail, make sure to use Eudora Mailbox Cleaner (available via VersionTracker) to make sure all your old mail is imported correctly.

Escher

dscottbuch · Jun 4, 2003, 03:43 PM

I have 1.06 GB (I don't know if it GiBi or Giga

of mail going back to 1993. Yes, I do use this history quite frequently, including at least back to 1995. For me, it is in the best 'memory' of events I have. ( and NO I don't keep junk mail)

I find that Mail is excellent in organizing and access this type of mail history. The speed is quite acceptable on a 1GHz Titanium and the Junk filter is amazing for me. About 90% effective and very very easy to review, and throw out. It is also excellent in organizing multiple e-mail account, I have three that I use every day.

Where it is sadly lacking ( and for which I have high hope for Ver 2.0 which should come with Panther) is in the search function. Limited to a single search criteria is very limiting compared to Eudora.

Overall the look, integration with address book, which is also great, and stability make it a no-brainer for me. I just look forward to more comprehensive search capability.

bbales · Jun 4, 2003, 04:20 PM

Let me put in a plug for Entourage (unless, of course, you don't want to buy it!). I used to use Claris e-mailer, but that had to be abandoned when I went to X. I've dabbled with both Mail and Entourage, but just like Entourage better. (I originally went with it because Mail screwed up importing my E-mailer mail, but stayed because the features work a little better.) Search function is very good in Entourage. Plus you get other programs, too -- calendar and address book among them.

By the way, I have a ton of old e-mails, many of them business-related. Saving them has saved me more than once.

holygoat · Jun 4, 2003, 04:26 PM

Apologies if this is hijacking the thread a little, but can any Mac & Linux users compare Mail.app with KMail? That's where I'd be coming from.

Particularly I use a lot of folders and filters to sort things, and the shortcuts R, L, and A to reply, reply to list, and reply to all. Does Mail have list reply?

Thanks,
Rich

bacchus · Jun 4, 2003, 04:31 PM

I've been using a little cocoa mail application called Gyazmail, and it's been superb.

Super quick, tons of features and great support from the developer.

Gyazmail site

tooki · Jun 4, 2003, 06:02 PM

I found Mail.app to be (surprise!) simplistic.

I've been using Eudora since, um, forever, and my mail folder has followed me through many computers.

Other than Eudora, I would have to recommend Entourage. It's very full-featured, seems to be stable, and does have a fantastic UI. The OS X version of Entourage (at least, with all the Office updaters applied) is also resistant to the 2GB mail database bug. (Not that one shouldn't be rebuilding/compacting the DB occasionally for performance, anyway.) The only downside to Entourage is the proprietary mail database, which is 1) proprietary, and 2) VASTLY larger than other apps' databases for the same amount of mail.

So I use Eudora for my POP mail, and Entourage for my IMAP mail (since then, it's not being stored in the database, it's just being cached there).

There are other email programs out there -- Powermail, Nisus Mail, etc., but I've never tried them so I can't comment.

I don't particularly like Netscape mail, it always seemed clunky to me.

tooki

CatOne · Jun 5, 2003, 12:30 AM

Originally posted by ARENA:
I was going to post another thread to ask this, but i thought this one is fine...

How can i make mail archives with Mail.app?

I have over 3000 mails in my inbox that i would like to archive, burn to a cd and delete from the mail database in my HDD.
I could burn the entire -?/Library/Mail', but then how could i read those mails later?

Well... everything is in ~/Library/Mail. So if you want to back it up, that's where you start.

A simple way is just to use 'backup' and specify your mail folder. Then burn it to CD or something.

Or, if you wanna get down with your Unix bad self, do something like (from your home directory):

tar -czvf mailbackup.tar.gz ~/Library/Mail

And it should grind and give you a big fat tarball with all your mail. You can untar it back if you want. It's just files and folders, you can pick and choose what you want to overwrite if something goes awry.

passmaster16 · Jun 5, 2003, 12:58 AM

I won't be switching from Entourage to Mail until they fix the stupid resource fork problem. I hate having to explain why my Mac can't send a .doc file without having a duplicate file attached.

WJMoore · Jun 5, 2003, 03:01 AM

Originally posted by bacchus:
I've been using a little cocoa mail application called Gyazmail, and it's been superb.

Super quick, tons of features and great support from the developer.

Gyazmail site

Aside from the color scheme, which I find questionable that app looks good. The message threading it particually appealing, what's it like? I'm still yet to find a GUI mailer with the message threading capabilities of mutt...

Wesley